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Rockman, sounds as if it'd help you guys greatly to agree on a general playstyle for the match during picks & bans.

"Hey, how'd you guys feel about a pushing line up? I'd like to play Leshrac for a change" or is it more of a teamplay issue of no tp's or everyone playing on their own little islands? I'm out of town for a week now but would like to get back to a BIT MORE doto afterwards with you guys.

Well I've started to write a blog about Dota, I've also bought a sub to DotaBuff. Fun times.

Need to blog more though, put 2 posts up, got some likes then had to do a house warming at the weekend and had no time at all to write anything. I know what I'm like though, if I keep this up and it keeps going I'll drop you guys a link when theres some more interesting articles

Is Dotabuff more accurate when you have a sub? I ask because it's missing 30-40 wins and shows my win rate as ~45.5%. The reality is that I am only a handful (8?) of games off 50% when I check my in-game profile, so it's weird.

Things have been going better lately, and I caught a good game with rockman, but then that evening...

Solo queued random draft, got paired with a 4-stack, and they let the enemy team draft Lycan, DP and Keeper. One guy picked TA because he thought his buddy loved to play her, and then was mistaken, so all of the focus was on what they thought they wanted to play. (No consideration of the enemy lineup or its implications) There was pretty much no winning the game when they had out-drafted us with that much push. I think that's hard to get around when you're paired with a party of 4, though, as they won't want to listen to the odd man out.

Last note: I can't believe I've put so much time into this game. I'm nearing 900 hours and have played over 500 real matches. That may seem low, but some of you guys might remember that I started off playing coop bot for the first 6 months of playing. Regular matches didn't become my norm until a little bit before TI3. Now I only play coop bot when I can't guarantee I won't have to walk away from the PC.

In-game doesn't count coop bot games as real wins either, though. I probably had over 100 coop bot games before jumping into real matches, and it was not showing them under my total games or wins on the profile page. (you do get battle points and items, but that's it)

Maybe it's a discrepancy with in-game counting 'safe to leave' wins and db ignoring them. Regardless, learning to not care about win rates has helped me enjoy the game a lot more. I just try to make the in-game number go up and improve as I go.

Oh it was ranked too. Dat MMR is so meaningful (re: bullshit). Had to carry as hard as possible just to get it to last 45 minutes.

It's not rocket science to understand that the grouping based on first 5 games out of hundreds or for some thousands... is not really going to help... if it's only as good as random chance... it's not really matchmaking then is it?

I had a similar run of 6 or 7 in a row wins with random matchmaking. It wasn't even related to how well I played in any game almost. By 10 minutes or so the games were basically decided, sometimes I was involved with kills in games, sometimes I was just minding my own business in another lane. In that series of games the other teams actually lost the games on their own rather than us winning it really. It was just.... bad matchmaking.

Blizzard's system on StarCraft 2 resets the ladder every now and then to accommodate new players and re-evaluate the old ones at the least. Their matchmaking seems a lot better from what I remember as well. I rarely remember being totally outclassed or being matched with people who literally don't know how to play (or as another example... two partners who hadn't even completed their first 5 games yet... I lost that one too).

Then again maybe it's a deal because it's a 5 player team, whereas StarCraft 2 is more about 1v1 and 2v2. It's way more heavy on your own performance to win a game.

Originally Posted by Graerth

Rockman, sounds as if it'd help you guys greatly to agree on a general playstyle for the match during picks & bans.

"Hey, how'd you guys feel about a pushing line up? I'd like to play Leshrac for a change" or is it more of a teamplay issue of no tp's or everyone playing on their own little islands? I'm out of town for a week now but would like to get back to a BIT MORE doto afterwards with you guys.

We do that. But a lot of the time we're either A) not really making a strategy even though we say we are or B) just not paying attention at the beginning :P

And sometimes it's hard because we play Captains Draft or Random Draft and you can only start strategizing when the game starts and you see the hero pool. So maybe we should try more Captains mode... lol.

We probably don't decide who should take lead enough. But I think we've made a good core of guys who plays together very well, and communicates well in game. And there's not just our group from RPS of course.

We win more games than we lose together in general, so it's not all bad. But we could definitely improve. I definitely think we got the game knowledge enough to do so. It's mainly the beginning.

Our in-game communication is generally very good, some groups I think even really exceptional too IMO. It's just we kind of "wing it" at the beginning too much (me included very much, and maybe mostly me).

And yea if you're gonna be playing again I'll try to invite you, quite a few of us starting parties these days.

Yeah, have been forced to turn down invites when they've arrived as i've been (and am) in a place where internet ain't good enough for dota2. Just didn't want to leave a wrong impression of being a grumpy guy who don't want to play .

Is Dotabuff more accurate when you have a sub? I ask because it's missing 30-40 wins and shows my win rate as ~45.5%. The reality is that I am only a handful (8?) of games off 50% when I check my in-game profile, so it's weird.

No you just get WAYYYYY more stats. All the orange tabs at the top of this page are quite useful and are from DBuff+

I ran into a pretty good companion in a solo queue yesterday. He added me, partied up and we managed to save our second game from disaster. It was one of the best random pairings I've had in a long while, an I really enjoyed it. It was a breath of fresh air.

Later on, though, I was going to queue with my regular RL friend (binary_agenda) and this new guy asked if we had room. Sure, why not? We eventually ended up as 5 after two of his friends joined, and that's when I began getting nervous. They communicated really easily and all seemed to know each other, but I was worried that matchmaking would screw us.

We bombed in the game. Taking a new 5-stack into Captain's Mode turned out to be a bad idea, because the other team was playing really well. Things happened that *should not* have ever happened, like their offlane void getting kills on our trilane. It was really, really bad, but I felt better when I saw the enemies' dotabuff and realized I was against people with 4x my experience who regularly play in the very high skill pool.

In hindsight, though, I know it could have gone differently. I thought we'd be okay without immediately dewarding our blocked camp, but it allowed Void to be too confident and we were sapping too much carry xp. I also checked out the new friend and his buddies on dotabuff, and I think our team was playing the wrong people in their positions. His buddies' top heroes were all almost exclusively support, whereas Binary & have more of a mix. So, his friends should probably be #4 & 5 positions if we pair up again, and the other three of us can fill out the higher farm roles.

So, yeah... queueing with one other person seems to be my safest bet lately. Adding friends-of-friends with thousands of games tends to tell matchmaking that we want to get bent over a barrel.

I'm sure that disconnect loss was infuriating. Between that bad luck and your post on the dota article, might I suggest a brief hiatus?

One good thing came out of the recent loss I wrote about, though. The newly-added friend seemed to consider me of competent skill level, but his buddies questioned that of my RL teammate. I generally consider this friend to be better than I am at dota, so having someone else think I was better was... strangely nice.

He's probably still better, but that friend tends to be critical toward mistakes, so it was nice to hear.

Also, my RPS parties have been going better lately. I credit the renewed intentionality among the people I usually queue with. It's been working better than the usual, more casual "Yeah, let's queue and pick whatever" approach.

Didn't get to play for this week but yea made some better games with the more serious early game and picks analyzing

More comfortable with some players versus others too, sometimes you just click well with people based on your communication and also how you are most comfortable playing X hero within a given team. A common plan is the way to go, like any RL team sport.

Also about Source 2 that's cool. But I guess it only really matters when dota visually changes to make it all the new engine parts sing.

Or it's released to public/some developer makes a game with its new tricks. There's so many engines out there with great looking and acting games so I'm not that fussed about it tbh. Of course until source or any other engine gives me a reason to be excited.